Last Friday we had a character session for Whispering Vault. My girlfriend's character is defined by having grown up in the Warsaw ghetto and her experiences there fighting Nazis during their occupation. Her avatar is the five bodies of herself and her family, fused into one monstrous and intimidating being after having been burned to death clinging to each other. I think she said her stalker name is Pentecost.

Tom's character is a neanderthal who died fighting the Unbidden before the dawn of history. His avatar is his own fossilized skeleton, complete with fiberglass parts replacing what's missing, and the same hardened wooden club he used when he was alive.

They're both freakin' awesome characters. And compared to them, my character sucks.

I went into the character creation session with only the sketchiest of ideas. I thought I could create a fairly intense avatar from the idea of him having been a skinhead when he was alive. I was partly motivated by recognizing how all the characters I've ever played with the group have had sexual and family issues. My Mage character had been sold into sexual slavery by her parents. My Sorcerer character had an ongoing adulterous affair with the wife of his employer. And my WYRD character had a conflict between his "ambition" and his tragic flaw of "lover of women." So part of making the former skinhead was wanting to break from my pattern with a character who had different kinds of issues. That may have been a mistake, because ultimately, my skinhead character is one-dimensional and boring as shit. The imagery of his avatar is uninspired. I've tried to come up with ways of ramping up the intensity of the avatar so it's comparable with what Tom and Danielle have for their characters, and yeah, I can make it more intense, but everything I come up with also makes him dramatically less worthy of being a stalker. He sucks. Not a one of the other players is interested in him as a protagonist, least of all me.

So, what am I going to do? I'm going to make up a different character, that's what.

But someone needs to design me a game where the players make up each other's characters, because the grass is pretty damn green on the other side of the fence and I want to be playing over there.

Paul

Ok, this is only tangental to the above post, but I keep seeing references to this Whispering Vault game that sound friggin awesome. I find some fan sites on the web which sound friggin awesome. But all links to any official site seem broken.

Where the heck get I get my hands on this thing?

Funny you should say that... one of my players was telling me something related just a couple days ago. He said he would prefer character creation to always include choices made by other players. Sort of collaborative character creation, maybe also including (if you could make it work) letting players define things about other characters that the characters don't even know about themselves, at least at the start of play.

Playing grogs in Ars Magica sometimes lets you play a character someone else had made, right? Everybody makes a couple grogs, nobody necessarily owns a grog, and anybody might play them. When we played Ars Magica, in fact, we had more fun playing those grogs than the magi, and we mostly ended up playing grogs that someone else had made.

I think it could definitely be fun to go all the way and play characters entirely made by other players... and of course, it would be refreshing to make characters for other players, as well.

Rich

Hey Rich,

Funny you should say that... one of my players was telling me something related just a couple days ago. He said he would prefer character creation to always include choices made by other players.

He's a smart guy. You should game Narrativist with him. A player character's protagonism comes from audience interest in the character. A character creation session where players share and accept input into their characters, each essentially letting the other players tell them what it would take to make the character interesting, is a fantastic and effective way to begin a Narrativist game.

Paul

Everyone,

The Whispering Vault is, IMO, the best darned RPG out there, period. It makes me giddy just thinking about it.

Consider for a moment a game where you can actually play a character composed of the fused bodies of your family*, who you died protecting. Or the fossilized remains of Australopithecus, forever wandering the corridors of an endless museum filed with the bones of your ancestors. This is good shit.

Ralph,

As far as getting a copy, it shouldn't be that hard. Occasionally it shows up on E-bay. My local game store has copies of it and its supplements, or at least they did a few weeks ago. Maybe I can work something out for you, if you can't find it near you.

* My original sugggestion to Danielle was even more severe - I thought it would be interesting for her character to be a giant, living pile of dessicated corpses, scuttling along on its myriad twisted limbs like some giant beetle, attacking with hundreds of outstretched hands. Powerful stuff, and all perfectly viable in The Vault. Ultimately, she opted for something more personal, which is always better, but it's a good example of the stuff this game encourages.

He's a smart guy. You should game Narrativist with him.

Rich,

First, I just started a thread to address your last question over in RPG theory.

Paul,

Sometimes we change what we've been focusing on because we thing we should. Sometimes that's productive, sometimes not. But I think we value novelty over our true concerns sometimes, when doing creative stuff, and you might want to consider that. If you've got a thematic hankerign in your PCs, maybe you should just burn it till it's all gone.

Or maybe not.

If not: I'd love, frankly, to hear more about your skinhead. In your post you spend a full paragraph describing how he's a) not like your other characters, b) not as intense as the other two PCs.

Fine. But what actually is he? Comparisons against something can be fruitful beginnings, but so far it sounds like you're just comparing -- and thus only finding negative space. He's a skin head. Why was he a skin head? I'm only guessing here, but in your conception was he just a fuck up because he was a skin head? Because if you could find the real honor or sympathy in being a skin head, in his mind and heart, the pain of what turned him down this path -- the good he thought he was trying to do -- it seems to me you'd be on a very twisted path toward some interesting play.

In many ways he was an active stalker in his life of flesh. What was he stalking? What did he want to stop, destroy? Why? Why be a skinhead?

I'd love to hear your take on this in terms of your character design.

Sounds like a freakin' great start to me -- just not yet tapped.

Christopher

Yeah, I also wanna know what kind of skin this dude is; I mean, there are skins and skins, you know. Quite possibly a re-analysis of this characters motivations would be all thats needed.

Hey Christopher, Gareth,

He was a skinhead because I wanted some intense imagery to draw on for an Avatar. It turned out to be a remarkably crumbly substrate. I think he was unsatisfying, to me and to everyone, because he lacked the burgeoning heroism that I'm seeing now as essential to a good Whispering Vault character. Danielle's character, who died trying to protect her family from Nazis and an Unbidden in the Warsaw ghetto has it right. Tom's character, who spent his prehistoric life hunting an Unbidden, does as well. He always was a hero. My character, who in the process of committing a hate crime with a couple of buddies, got his hands on an Unbidden, just seemed to me more gross and more racist from the experience of killing the thing. I couldn't actually imagine him having the mandatory compassion Key. And his Avatar imagery fell apart on me as well. The best I could come up with was a skinless human with the boots, tattoos over the bare muscle, and blood always leaking from his hands. Scott came up with an interesting idea for his Domain, essentially a full-sized 1950's-esque doll house with perfect, white mannikin-like parents and idealized doll-like minorities as servants. It's not that I don't think there's potential with the character. Imagine him getting a Call from a slave on a pre-war plantation and the Stalkers emerging in the bodies of slaves. He could be turned from monster to hero by that kind of situation. But without the compassion Key, he's really drifted from what a starting Whispering Vault character is supposed to be.

Compare him to the replacement character I've been working up. The idea starts with a scientist in the future, a botanist or bioengineer with a large hydroponics-based greenhouse. He's working with plant hybrids, perhaps trying to create a whole ecosystem on one plant through grafting and genetic engineering. For some reason his home is attacked, and an Unbidden is part of the attack. He's killed defending his wife and newborn child. She flees to the greenhouse with the infant and hides it in the branches of the plant (which are like twisted and green shoots of bamboo rising up from a large, woody root-mass under the surface of the water), before turning back to lure the attackers away from the greenhouse. She is killed in one of the bedrooms. The Unbidden enters the greenhouse, searching, but the plant hides the infant from it somehow, and nurses it from nipple-like organs in its branches.

It is the plant that delivers the call. Stalkers come and deal with the Unbidden. They take the infant to be raised with relatives of the scientist. And they make the plant a Stalker.

I don't have a name for him yet. His Avatar is a anthropomorphized version of what he was as a plant, with twisted green bamboo-like arms, and a head, torso, and legs that are woody, waterlogged, ropy, and root-like. His body has strange blooms grafted onto it. I like the idea of him having high presence, like an Ent maybe. And his Servitors live inside of him. I picture his realm as a primal swamp, where he floats underwater, spiritual and meditative. I'm considering playing up the idea that he's hermaphroditic too.

So it's obvious that I was inspired quite a bit by Alan Moore and Berni Wrightson's rendering of Swamp Thing. I'm thinking still on how to differentiate him from Swamp Thing a bit better than I already have. I need to think more on the hermaphrodite thing. And I want to play him up as being less mobile looking than Swamp Thing. There's something very cool in my mind about a large, shadowy, basically immobile plant that fights evil.

And from email responses I've received from the other players, it seems they're a lot more interested in his protagonism than they were of the skinhead. I've written before about how effective I think group character creation is to making protagonism possible. This recent situation with my Whispering Vault character has me thinking a lot about just exactly what group character creation is delivering to make that possible. I didn't create my replacement character round-robin with the group. Am I just lucky they're interested in him?

Paul

Paul,
Seems you already have another char concept in mind... But I think the skindhead could be a great char if you worked on it a little. Your basic concept is just a little too generic right now.

Skinheads are not all violent racist bastards. And even when they are, there are human concerns or conditions underlying the violence, just like with anyone. Check out the films Romper Stomper and American History X for two very different views. The term originated in Jamaica, describing shaven head ska-reggae fans, who were black. There are also SHARP skins in the U.S. and Eupore (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice). You could tweak the character to be an anti-racist killed by racist skins to give you the heroic edge you're looking for.

And I think a skinless, yet tatooed, blood-oozing, black leather garbed Avatar would scare the crap out of me! Maybe add some Hellraiser or Spawn style chains, fingers that open into knives, crazy colored eyes.

Man, I can't wait to play some Whispering Vault at GenCon this year!

Sean

Paul,

I, too, was looking for the "sympathetic" angle for the skin head (though I wouldn't go so far as to make him an anti-racist skinhead, 'cause that kind of blows the game).

I know you've moved on, but I'll continue a bit for any interested parties.

There was an article in the New Yorker about a year and a half ago about Militia Groups in Montana. And what the writer found was a lot of men with bad relationships with their dads, feeling cut off and cut out of a very happy nation all bonding together to have a place to belong and make a world they can understand and treat them well.

I suppose if someone said to me, "Okay, Christopher, tonight you're playing a skinhead who's now a WV character" (which is the kind of thing Greg Gordon did to me often), the first thing I'd think is, "Why a skin head? Did his dad lose his company and he's looking for someone to blame? Did he grow up in foster homes and needs to attack anyone who he "thinks" should not be better off than him, but is?" Then I'd start thinking about where the Unbidden fit in: he sees them as the dark results of the "wrong" people being alive, thinks he's after the core of the "wrong races" being alive, whatnot...

Then he discovers that he's been wrong all the time. That he's more like the Pakastani down the street than he ever assumed once he sees what the Unbidden are.

My character's avatar then, isn't a Skinhead cartoon, but something childlike that's been hunting monsters with a plastic sword because he's been so afraid all his life, everything made him jump. Kind of like an enormous Baby Huey. He's still naive in many ways, but learning that what he thinks the problem is, and what it actually is, are often two different things. He's marked with a Nazi Swastika, unable to erase the deeds he's done in his past, knowing that he's an "unbidden" monster to so many people who might see him in the Dreaming -- and wishing he could make them understand he's really trying to do good now. Now he's the monster he always assumed peopel to be.

His empathy is all based on the fear people have of being overwhelmed by forces they can't comprehend. He wants to reassure people, but terrifies people. He wants to hunt these monsters, but knows that for all intents and purposes, he was one himself.

He's somewhat childlike in mind, childlkike and overwhelming in body, and trying to atone for adult sins that he could barely understand. The skinhead fascist imagery would haunt him like the nightmarish, infantilized mobiles of a baby's crib.

That's where I'd go with it.

Back to your comments, though, I think your right.. using the Skinhead as Avatar wouldn't work for my as substrata either. I'm always a "emotional heartbeat" kind of guy... And then let the pictures come out of that.

Christopher

Chris, we meet again. I'm not a stalker, I swear...

Excellent version, Chris. That would fix it for me.

Mike

I know this is an old topic but did anyone see the movie Higher Learning? There was this guy looking to fit in somewhere, anywhere, and he found a place with the skinheads not because he agreed with them but because they provided a place of community for him.

---Jon